Windows 11 started rolling out almost two months ago, but due to the fact that it"s being made available in a staggered manner with some pretty strict system requirements, not everyone has received it yet. That said, many use-cases including those related to software development require developers to test their apps on the latest version of Microsoft"s operating system in order to ensure that performance and functionalities work as expected. To cater to this audience, Microsoft has now rolled out a virtual machine running Windows 11 Enterprise for evaluation purposes.
There are four download options available depending upon which virtualization software you are using and include VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and Parallels. The machine includes the following software pre-installed:
- Window 11 Enterprise (evaluation)
- Windows 10 SDK, version 2004 (10.0.19041.0)
- Visual Studio 2019 (latest as of 10/09/21) with the UWP, .NET desktop, and Azure workflows enabled and also includes the Windows Template Studio extension
- Visual Studio Code (latest as of 10/09/21)
- Windows Subsystem for Linux enabled with Ubuntu installed
- Developer mode enabled
- Windows Terminal installed
The download for the Windows 11 Enterprise machine weighs in at 20GB and expires on January 9, 2022. As pointed out by ZDNet, the dedicated download page is incorrectly titled "Get a Windows 10 development environment" even though the files included pack Windows 11 Enterprise. Check it out here.